As you know, 1UP.com has breathed its last. Such are the vicissitudes of business. Happily, Jose Otero managed to pull together a startling number of former 1UP staff during Game Developers Conference this year for one final podcast. Not everyone was there due to the last-minute nature of this show (or because they had other duties that kept them away), but if you paid any attention at all to the site for the 10 years it lived you're bound to hear some voices you recognize in this three-hour tag-team adventure. Rather than spoil the surprise, though, we'd rather just let you hear the show for yourself.

Thanks for all the years of support. Your enthusiasm for our work fueled these shows, and we very literally couldn't have done it without you. Please enjoy this final gift to you all.

Review: Bending Genres in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

A look into the underpinnings of an unlikely sequel reveals the value of Luigi's spin-offs.

On the surface of it, Luigi's Mansion seems a strange choice for Nintendo to explore in a sequel, especially one arriving nearly 12 years after the first (and only other) entry in the series. The 2001 GameCube launch title was met with resounding jeers and criticism at its debut, disparaged as an insubstantial piece of fluff that exposed the tragedy of a Nintendo in sharp decline. As one of he company's first-ever large-scale critical duds, Luigi's Mansion marked (in spirit if not in fact) the beginning of a very difficult console cycle for Nintendo -- one salvaged by the Wii, though its spectre looms over the Wii U like the snickering apparitions Luigi is tasked with capturing in these solo outings.

Yet this counter-intuitive sequel works; and in fact Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon works not only as a game in its own right, but also in recontextualizing its predecessor as merely misunderstood rather than outright poor. Of course Luigi's Mansion didn't go over well. Every Nintendo console before the GameCube debuted with a core Mario title; we expected to be wowed with something revolutionary as the Emotion-Engine-crushing GameCube took to the stage. Instead, we got a compact confection of a side-story starring Luigi rather than Mario and shockingly light on anything resembling action -- not to mention completely absent platforming.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate brings the series back to Nintendo's portable systems, where it thrived for a decade, after a lengthy hiatus. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a single glaring problem: It's not very good.

An Unflattering Boll Cut

Why the notorious director of
Postal, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne might actually be a genius.

F

ew names raise the ire of
gamers as much as Uwe Boll's. The mere
mention of his name in certain circles is sure to cause great anguish
and a gnashing of teeth. He is as reviled among video game enthusiasts
as Jack Thompson. Boll makes movies, famously terrible movies, that
transcend their mere affiliation with video gaming in their universal
dislike. It's not just gamers who hate his films, but everyone. It's
gamers, however, who harbor the purest of hatred. His highest rated
film on film-review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes is 11% fresh. His
lowest is 2005's Alone in the Dark,
which has a 1% fresh
rating. That's one percent. Anyone with good taste, or any taste for
that matter, is put off by the mind-numbingly terrible movies Boll is
somehow able to churn out with a surprising regularity. Video gamers
hate him particularly because of his films like Postal,
Far
Cry, and
BloodRayne.

But is the unmitigated hate
warranted? Is there some redeeming nugget of genius hiding within these
pictures, some sly subversiveness that we're all missing? To find out
if perhaps Boll's movies are redeemable when viewed with a skeptical
eye, I decided to put myself to the test by watching a few.

As the next generation of home
consoles slowly emerge into the
limelight and enter the minds of the mass consumer, it's
great to see some current gen games continue to show their potential.
Take Gears
of War, a series that
practically signaled the start of this current gen back in late 2006.
At the time, developer Epic Games delivered a memorable and new
third-person shooter IP that certainly looked impressive, but also
ushered in fun gameplay mechanics through an impromptu cover-based
system -- one that urged players to use cover as respite from the hail
of enemy bullets. But who knew the idea of campaign coop over the
Internet could possibly impact the experience the way it did? And post
GoW, the entire shooter genre followed suit.

In hindsight, those three
pillars of visual bombast, fun combat loops, and cooperative play over
the net defined lots of shooters during this console cycle, but after a
trilogy of GoW games -- delivered relatively closely over a five-year
span -- how can the series possibly stay fresh and fun? Surprisingly
the latest game, Gears
of War: Judgment, makes a strong
argument that the series isn't only surprisingly relevant, but that the
developers also figured out some neat tricks other video game makers
should crib.

The Cinematic Nature of
Parasite Eve

Square's theatrical
RPG was a bizarre evolutionary dead end in video game storytelling.

P

arasite
Eve is, after fifteen years, a
forgotten footnote in the great video game canon. Yoko
Shimomura's soundtrack endures lo these many years later, but
otherwise it's just another of those wacky experiments from
Squaresoft's golden age; a piece of trivia for RPG fetishists
and PS1 buffs. Failure is the game's greatest legacy. Not as
a game -- it's actually pretty great to play, even
now -- but as a model for telling stories in games. Director
Takashi Tokita and his team called their game a "cinematic
RPG," an explicit attempt to meld the flash of film with what
was at the time video game's best storytelling tools. It
didn't work, but it was a necessary evolutionary step,
fitting for a game that is itself all about evolution.

The common complaint about most
story-based video games goes like this: I'd like the game if
it wasn't for all the cut-scenes. As video games scrambled
tooth and nail to tell stories, they naturally turned to the language
of film for creating human drama. How else would you get two people in
the game to talk to each other naturally? If you leave the player in
control while the characters around them speak naturally, the scene
loses its dramatic impact. Think about poor Alyx Vance in Half-Life
2
trying to have a serious chat about the miseries of life under the
combine as Gordon Freeman spastically spins in circles, crowbarring
everything in sight as he roots around for ammo like a pig for
truffles. So the formula has gone like this: play a little game, stop
for a brief cinema while the characters talk or there's a big
action set piece impossible within the parameters of the game, play
some more, watch a long cinema at the end. Technology has improved the
formula, smoothing the transition by keeping the game's
characters and models consistent across cut-scenes and play, but
it's been largely the same since 1998 benchmarks like Metal
Gear Solid.

Although the economy might not be in the thick of a recession as it once was, that doesn't mean things are going especially great for videogame publishers. Take Electronic Arts, for instance, which hasn't exactly set the world on fire with its performance as of late. The start of the next generation is an ideal opportunity to effect change that doesn't come along often, and it seems EA doesn't intend to miss it; just yesterday it revealed plans to proliferate microtransactions throughout each of its games. As EA and publishers in general attempt to do this (and try out other means for generating additional revenue), I hope they don't forget to treat gamers with respect.

This current generation of consoles has seen the onset of numerous new money-making tactics. While expansion packs had been offered in the past, downloadable content became the norm for nearly every game, delivering everything from horse armor to new characters, maps, and more. Online passes have attempted to fight used games sales, encouraging gamers to buy new copies of their games or, failing that, forcing them to pay money directly to the publisher for access to certain (often multiplayer) content. Always-online connections, allegedly intended to enable new features but with the obvious benefit of trying to ward off piracy, spread from games where its use was implicit to those where its use is a detriment more than anything else.
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Excited as I was to finally see a next-generation console, much of the PlayStation 4 software we saw last week struck me as underwhelming. It was pretty, certainly, and I'm all for beautiful games; I paid a great deal to upgrade my PC in 2011 so that Battlefield 3 would look its finest, and it irks me that Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 each stresses my computer to the point that I can't see every last bit of visual goodness they have to offer and maintain a decent framerate. Still, gorgeous graphics are not all I want out of new games, and yet it would seem as if the PS4's hardware is being extolled purely for its ability to accommodate even nicer-looking visuals.

That belief is representative of the majority of what Sony had on show last week. While the capabilities of the hardware to push more pixels was invariably going to be a major part of the event, with the way things went you could be left thinking the future of games entails little more than better-looking games that boot up faster than ever. That's all well and good -- I am legitimately excited for auto-downloads, suspend modes, and all manners of hurdles between player and game being removed -- but the hurdles Sony and Microsoft should be doing their damndest to remove lay between independent developers and next-generation consoles.
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There is no getting around the similarities between Urban Trial Freestyle and the Trials series. The former, being a brand new game coming after several Trials titles, including two extremely successful XBLA games, is invariably going to attract cries of copycat. Part of that might be due to ignorance over the fact that motorcycle trials are a real thing, albeit something that isn't especially popular in the U.S. Regardless, being based on the same sport or activity means sharing a lot in common. Beyond those basics Freestyle does make some effort at distinguishing itself, although it fails to do so in any way that truly makes it superior.

Just like Trials, Freestyle is a game all about balance. You race trials bikes through 2.5D environments while shifting your weight forward and backward and exercising control with the throttle in an effort to avoid falling off. Not every event is a race to the finish, as in Trials; those do exist, but you'll also spend time on each level completing objectives located at specific points like high jumps, long jumps, speed checks. You're never required to exceed a certain benchmark; you simply do the best you can on each stunt as you make your way to the finish, which has to be reached in less than five minutes. The sooner your make it to the finish the more bonus points you'll receive, but the allure of returning to a checkpoint and retrying a stunt can be hard to resist when each one has an accompanying leaderboard and an in-level indication of its top player. It's easy to blow several minutes trying to top yourself on a stunt, which is a calculated risk as returning to the most recent checkpoint means forsaking the score you've already set.
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Always
the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake,
working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed
-- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic
centimeters inside your skull. -- George Orwell, 1984

Ever since George Orwell
published his dystopian masterpiece in 1949,
people have compared it to the current state of national or
international affairs. But in the always-connected, always-public world
of 2013, perhaps the novel's themes hit closer to home than ever. We're
living in a time of fierce debate over privacy concerns, an era where
government and law enforcement argue for the right to GPS-track
citizens without their knowledge. And like any form of art, video games
are influenced by life.

During
the PlayStation 4 event, Ubisoft and Sucker Punch gave the world a
glimpse of their upcoming titles. And while there are clear differences
between Watch
Dogs and inFamous:
Second Son, it's hard to ignore
the
overriding sense of paranoia and fear over a totalitarian state.
Superheroes don't always wear a cape, and in the case of Aiden Pearce
and Delsin Rowe, the rise of the anti-hero is a consequence of an
oppressive regime.